Research Seminar Series - Elisabetta Nadalutti

Elisabetta Nadalutti

WIRL-COFUND Fellow at the Politics and International Studies (PAIS) department at the University of Warwick

Is Cross-Border Cooperation Underpinned by a Cross-Border Governance Ethical Code?

New borders are springing up. Existing ones are hardening. Why is it so difficult to create joined institutional cross-border linkages in cross-border regions (CBR) around the world despite the implementation of ad hoc bodies and decades of cross-border cooperation (CBC) activities? Why do regional, municipal, local institutions and actors pursue different approaches for solving common problems in CBRs? Why cross-border ties between friends, relatives, and nearby communities become looser instead of stronger despite CBC has increased? This article aims to impact CBC by shifting the focus from its main economic and political angle to its ethical-humanist dimension since CBRs cannot be analyzed as mere geopolitical, cultural, and economic places. They are also ‘ethical spaces’ inhabited by people. Accordingly, the ethical dimension of borders and the values that underpin CBC need to be scrutinized since border spaces are part and parcel of human activities. And precisely because they are ‘human’, they must be structured and governed in an ethical manner. That is why it is normatively important to determine whether ethical values such as trust, obligations, responsibility and solidarity on which social exchange is grounded are present in the language of and considered by policymakers and stakeholders operating on CBC policies. The outcome of this analysis is an original, alternative modern CBC roadmap where inherent ethical questions in CBC cannot be further sidestepped.